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Laravel Forge vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Introduction
This Markdown code provides a comparison between Laravel Forge and Terraform, outlining the key differences between the two.
Deployment and Management: Laravel Forge is a platform that simplifies the deployment and management of web applications on cloud providers like AWS, DigitalOcean, and Linode. It provides a user-friendly interface for server provisioning and configuration. In contrast, Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that enables the provisioning and management of cloud resources across different cloud providers. It allows for the creation of infrastructure in a declarative manner using a configuration language.
Flexibility and Portability: Laravel Forge is specifically designed for PHP web application deployment and is tightly coupled with Laravel framework. It offers preconfigured server templates and easy integration with Laravel applications. On the other hand, Terraform is cloud provider-agnostic and supports a wide range of services and platforms. It provides a consistent way to manage infrastructure regardless of the cloud provider, making it more flexible and portable.
Granularity of Control: Laravel Forge provides a high-level abstraction and automates many server management tasks, making it quick and easy to set up servers and deploy applications. However, it may limit the level of control and customization available for advanced configurations. In contrast, Terraform allows for fine-grained control over infrastructure provisioning, enabling users to define and manage resources with greater control and customization.
Community and Ecosystem: Laravel Forge has a strong community and ecosystem with extensive documentation, tutorials, and user support. It is specifically tailored for PHP and Laravel developers, offering a range of features and integrations for streamlined development workflows. On the other hand, Terraform has a larger and more diverse community due to its wider adoption and support for multiple cloud providers. It benefits from a more extensive ecosystem with a wide range of community-created modules and integrations.
Learning Curve and Complexity: Laravel Forge is designed to be user-friendly and easy to use, particularly for Laravel developers familiar with the Laravel ecosystem. It provides a simpler and more intuitive interface, reducing the learning curve for deployment and management tasks. Conversely, Terraform has a steeper learning curve due to its more complex configuration language and broader scope. It requires a deeper understanding of infrastructure concepts and cloud provider-specific settings.
Cost and Pricing: Laravel Forge offers a subscription-based pricing model, with different plans based on the number of servers and additional features. The cost is predictable and mainly depends on the requirements of the specific applications being deployed. Terraform, on the other hand, is an open-source tool and free to use. However, it may incur costs associated with the cloud resources provisioned using Terraform, depending on the cloud provider and the resources being used.
In summary, Laravel Forge is a specialized platform for PHP web application deployment, providing a user-friendly interface and seamless integration with Laravel applications. Terraform, on the other hand, is a flexible and cloud provider-agnostic infrastructure as code tool, allowing for fine-grained control and portability across different cloud platforms.
Because Pulumi uses real programming languages, you can actually write abstractions for your infrastructure code, which is incredibly empowering. You still 'describe' your desired state, but by having a programming language at your fingers, you can factor out patterns, and package it up for easier consumption.
We use Terraform to manage AWS cloud environment for the project. It is pretty complex, largely static, security-focused, and constantly evolving.
Terraform provides descriptive (declarative) way of defining the target configuration, where it can work out the dependencies between configuration elements and apply differences without re-provisioning the entire cloud stack.
AdvantagesTerraform is vendor-neutral in a way that it is using a common configuration language (HCL) with plugins (providers) for multiple cloud and service providers.
Terraform keeps track of the previous state of the deployment and applies incremental changes, resulting in faster deployment times.
Terraform allows us to share reusable modules between projects. We have built an impressive library of modules internally, which makes it very easy to assemble a new project from pre-fabricated building blocks.
DisadvantagesSoftware is imperfect, and Terraform is no exception. Occasionally we hit annoying bugs that we have to work around. The interaction with any underlying APIs is encapsulated inside 3rd party Terraform providers, and any bug fixes or new features require a provider release. Some providers have very poor coverage of the underlying APIs.
Terraform is not great for managing highly dynamic parts of cloud environments. That part is better delegated to other tools or scripts.
Terraform state may go out of sync with the target environment or with the source configuration, which often results in painful reconciliation.
I personally am not a huge fan of vendor lock in for multiple reasons:
- I've seen cost saving moves to the cloud end up costing a fortune and trapping companies due to over utilization of cloud specific features.
- I've seen S3 failures nearly take down half the internet.
- I've seen companies get stuck in the cloud because they aren't built cloud agnostic.
I choose to use terraform for my cloud provisioning for these reasons:
- It's cloud agnostic so I can use it no matter where I am.
- It isn't difficult to use and uses a relatively easy to read language.
- It tests infrastructure before running it, and enables me to see and keep changes up to date.
- It runs from the same CLI I do most of my CM work from.
Context: I wanted to create an end to end IoT data pipeline simulation in Google Cloud IoT Core and other GCP services. I never touched Terraform meaningfully until working on this project, and it's one of the best explorations in my development career. The documentation and syntax is incredibly human-readable and friendly. I'm used to building infrastructure through the google apis via Python , but I'm so glad past Sung did not make that decision. I was tempted to use Google Cloud Deployment Manager, but the templates were a bit convoluted by first impression. I'm glad past Sung did not make this decision either.
Solution: Leveraging Google Cloud Build Google Cloud Run Google Cloud Bigtable Google BigQuery Google Cloud Storage Google Compute Engine along with some other fun tools, I can deploy over 40 GCP resources using Terraform!
Check Out My Architecture: CLICK ME
Check out the GitHub repo attached
Pros of Laravel Forge
- Simply to use4
Pros of Terraform
- Infrastructure as code121
- Declarative syntax73
- Planning45
- Simple28
- Parallelism24
- Well-documented8
- Cloud agnostic8
- It's like coding your infrastructure in simple English6
- Immutable infrastructure6
- Platform agnostic5
- Extendable4
- Automation4
- Automates infrastructure deployments4
- Portability4
- Lightweight2
- Scales to hundreds of hosts2
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Cons of Laravel Forge
- Monthly subscription2
Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
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